Allen Matthews, managing director of OwnerShips Ltd died of cancer in February 2010 leaving personal and company debts of about three million pounds.

It's a long and complicated story, involving maybe two thousand boaters and a lot of personal and financial interactions between Allen, his customers and his friends, over about twenty years. Essentially, Allen set up OwnerShips twenty years ago to manage narrowboats and charged their joint-owners for his services; as well as collecting the money that was for his management company, he also collected their contributions for licences, mooring fees, waterway engineers etc, the so-called 'Sinking Funds'. He also commissioned building of new narrowboats, recruiting customers to buy them, and administered a thriving business in buying and selling shares in the boats, as new owners joined and existing owners left the scheme.

He had some grand schemes relating to wide boats rather than narrowboats, and needed capital to finance the projects: he could have gone to the bank, but instead asked OwnerShips customers to loan him a capital sum of about three thousand pounds, in exchange for remitting their annual management fees, an apparent return of about fifteen percent. He was not short of takers for this scheme, and by raising most of a million pounds in this way, he had significantly reduced his company's future income.